Asus 2400ET All-In-One Touch Desktop Review

Article Index

Touchscreen Technology

What you think of the 2400IGTS' touchscreen technology will depend significantly on why you're buyimg a touch-enabled Windows 7-based PC in the first place. Dave went over some of the touch system's strengths in his video at the beginning of the article; we'll discuss the pros and cons in a bit more detail here.

Asus EEE Cinema / Multimedia PlayerPromises Potential...

Asus' EEE Cinema app may be a less-than-perfect Blu-ray player in its current form, but it's capable of managing audio and video files, movie playback, and photo display as well. This last bit is important—the app can be used to create image slideshows, but there's no embedded editing functionality.

None of the embedded content playback programs offers sophisticated options; there are no right-click context menus, etc. The good news is that while the program's UI is very simple, it also works very well. The content organization options that do exist are all finger-friendly; it's easy to create playlists or organize files by album, artist, genre, song (alphabetical) or playlist.

We like the current application suite because it suggests Asus understands how the mechanics of touch differ from standard context programs. It's much easier to integrate functionality once basic design principles are established than it is to fix a program designed by people who don't understand touch interfaces in the first place.

Microsoft Blackboard, Windows 7 Touch Pack App

Unfortunately, Asus' Cinema suite is a touch-friendly application running on a desktop PC with an OS--Windows 7--that wasn't designed with touch in mind. Rather than redesigning GUI elements to make touch more useful, Microsoft opted to mimic mouse functionality. Essnetially, big finger presses are translated into small, exacting mouse clicks.

It's possible to adjust the size of the 'click' button and program icons and menus can be magnified by the appropriate option. This makes the click 'field' larger, but doesn't improve accuracy. These options can actually make touch more difficult for example by opening the 'Edit' bar when you actually intended to click on 'File' or the like.

Touch-enabled Windows systems usually make more sense in the handheld or highly mobile spaces, like a laptop that can convert to a tablet for example. Even then, the appeal is diminished by Windows 7's less than optimal implementation. While there be may some users that actually want a desktop all-in-one with touchscreen capability, we wish Asus offered a version of the 2400IGTS without this feature to bring the price down a bit.